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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23259793">In the middle of nowhere</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bumblie_Bee/pseuds/Bumblie_Bee'>Bumblie_Bee</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek &amp; Paul/Levenson</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Car Accidents, Don't worry, Gen, Ghost Connor Murphy (Dear Evan Hansen), Ghost Evan Hansen, Hospitals, Hurt Evan, Hurt/Comfort, I apologise to Heidi for writing this, In a sense, Near Death Experiences, Shes okay at the end though, kind of anyway</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 06:08:39</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>14,832</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23259793</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bumblie_Bee/pseuds/Bumblie_Bee</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>On a dreary evening in March, whilst driving home from a shift at the Pottery Barn, Evan Hansen had been involved in a car accident.  </p><p>He hadn't expected to survive the crash, the other car had been going much too fast for that, but he also hadn't expected to climb from his crumpled car afterwards and leave his body behind in the driver's seat.  </p><p>He'd been silently stood beside his ruined vehicle, numbly watching the chaos he's inadvertently caused when he'd noticed a familiar presence behind him, their silhouette dark against the soft grey-blue of the early evening sky. He hadn't need to look to know who was there. </p><p>“Am I dead?” he'd asked quietly, his eyes still fixed on his body. “Is that why I'm here?" He'd paused, frowned, turned to find Connor watching him with a bored expression. "Is that why you’re here?”</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Evan Hansen &amp; Connor Murphy, Evan Hansen &amp; Heidi Hansen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>94</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Part 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I apologise to Heidi in advance.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Evan doesn’t like to drive. He never has, and he knows he never will.</p><p>There’s just too much that can go wrong with driving, too many variables he just can’t control.</p><p>He doesn’t like that so much of his safety is entrusted on the driving ability of others, on them obeying signals and being sensible and careful and not doing anything stupid or unexpected.</p><p>He hates that there’s the possibility that the car could just give out on him, too, hates that the brakes could fail, or the engine catch fire, or a wheel fall off.</p><p>He doesn’t even trust the trees when he’s driving. They could fall in a gust or a rotten branch could break off in the rain. There’s also the chance they could be hiding wildlife from view, wildlife that could walk into the road in front of his car, cause him to crash and result in not just their untimely death but his as well.</p><p>Evan doesn’t trust himself when he’s driving either.</p><p>He thinks that’s probably more the reason he doesn’t like to drive.</p><p>It isn’t as though he’s a bad driver; he’d passed his test on his first try much to his mom’s delight and Jared’s shock, but he’s unexperienced, and he’s <em>him</em>, so there is definitely the chance that he brakes too late or corners too fast or just doesn’t notice something up ahead because he day dreams much more while driving than can possible be a good idea.</p><p>There’s also the fact that occasionally, if he’d had a particularly bad day at college, or if his shift at the Pottery Barn has been exhaustingly awful, there grows this little, niggling voice at the back of his messy brain that informs him how simple it would be to aim not for the road, but for a tree, or a wall, or an oncoming vehicle, and what an easy, innocent way that would be for it to end.  </p><p>It isn’t a difficult instinct to ignore, but Evan doesn’t like it being there all the same. He shouldn’t have to disregard a voice that reminds him of the fragility of cars and human bodies and his own mental health when he drives, but he’s him, so he does.</p><p>He has new medication now though, and that does help a little, does make him a little less <em>him</em>. It calms the eddying in his head that makes him certain he’s useless and tolerated and a burden to his mom, quietens the voices that encourage him to do stupid things like climb trees and not hold on or drive into oncoming traffic, softens his anxiety just a little more than his Xanax had.</p><p>They calm his brain enough that although he doesn’t like to drive, he does.</p><p>He drives to work, in the little blue car that he and his mom now share because although that means she has to get the bus to the hospital, it means he’s out engaging with the world and with the people in it and gaining skills and confidence and a little money for college rather than sitting in his room, curling in on himself just a little more each day.</p><p>Heidi is proud of him for getting the job, she’d told him so when he’d told her and then pulled him into a hug so tight Evan had feared for his ribs. He’d hugged he back though, rested his head on her shoulder and smiled and said that he was proud of himself too.</p><p>It hadn’t even been a lie when he’d said it.</p><p>After the year he’d had, he wasn’t even sure he would make it to the end of high school, let alone graduate, get a place at community college, and successfully interview for a job, even if it was just at the Potter Barn.</p><p>He’s even managed to win a couple of those scholarship essays.</p><p>It was unexpected.</p><p>All of it was.</p><p>Hell, the fact he’d even made it through those first few weeks after the Murphys had learnt what he had done was a minor miracle, looking back. He’d just wanted it to end at the time, and he’d been so, so close to gathering his unused medication along with the now out of date prescription painkillers still lingering at the back of their medicine cabinet from when he’d broken his arm and doing just that.</p><p>It had felt like a kick to the gut when he'd realised his mom had been just as relieved as he was surprised that he had made it through those weeks. She had been so upset, so scared of losing him, and he doesn’t want her to have to go through that again. He doesn’t want her to have to worry about him anymore. Not like that anyway.</p><p>So, Evan had tried to be better. He’d taken his meds and gone to therapy, and written essays for the contests, and thrown himself into his schoolwork.</p><p>He’d got the job at the Pottery Barn just before finals, and for a week afterwards, he and his mom had argued over the car. Or reverse argued, maybe, because both of them wanted the other to use it.</p><p>Heid had won, in the end, because, logically, she did have the best point; there was a bus that ran from just down their road to the hospital and not one that ran out to the pottery barn because it was literally in the middle of nowhere, so for her day shifts, she could take that. In return, Evan always made sure he was back before she needed to leave the house for a night shift or school and did much of the grocery shopping on his way.  </p><p>It worked well. Things were, well, not good, Evan’s brain was still nearly as much of a mess as their finances even with his new medication, but almost good, and so, although he doesn’t like to drive because he doesn’t trust himself, or the other drivers, or the environment, or his car enough not to try and kill him if he does, Evan understands that driving is now a necessary part of his life.     </p><p>It’s almost strange, he thinks as he stares out of the windscreen of the tired blue Ford, that so much flashed through his mind in the few milliseconds between him noticing the oncoming car and him understanding that they’re going to hit.</p><p>He stares with eyes wide and his heart in his throat as it hastily approaches, unsteady on the country road but never quite making it back to its own lane. Very, very briefly, he wonders why on earth it’s going so very fast before his thoughts return to the terrifying fact that their imminent collision probably isn’t going to be an accident he walks away from with cuts and bruises and maybe another broken wrist.</p><p>It probably isn’t going to be an accident he walks away from at all.</p><p>Somehow, he doesn’t feel as panicked as he thought he would.</p><p>It feels surreal, like he’s in one of his nightmares, except it isn’t a nightmare at all and he isn’t going to wake up just as he dies; he’s going to die as he dies. He finds the brake pedal, anyway, feels the pressure of it beneath his sneakers. The other driver doesn’t seem to know his own brake exists, or maybe he just isn’t paying enough attention to know Evan exists. That would figure.</p><p>Within milliseconds, it’s close enough that had the headlights been on, Evan would have been blinded.</p><p>Instinctively, he turns his head away and closes his eyes.</p><p>He whispers a goodbye to his mom even though she can’t hear him, and an apology even though he knows, after her grief fades, she’ll be better off without him.  </p><p>There’s the squeal of brakes.</p><p>The awful scream of tortured metal.</p><p>The shattering of glass.</p><p>The feeling of himself being flung roughly forwards.</p><p>And then everything goes white.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Part 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Find me on tumblr at bumblie-bee.</p><p>Comments and kudos are loved &lt;3</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Evan had expected crashing his car to hurt more. He’d expected to wake to a throbbing head and aching ribs and the sting of broken skin, but he doesn’t.</p><p>He wakes very suddenly though.</p><p>One moment there is nothing, and then the next he’s sat in the driver’s seat of the car, his hands still on the wheel and his foot on the pedal and the threadbare fabric rough against the back of his knees.</p><p>It’s a bit of a surprise because he really, honestly hadn’t thought he was going to wake at all.</p><p>Maybe his judgement of how fast the other car had been going had been off. It certainly seemed to take the two cars a lot longer to collide than he’d been expecting, but at the time he’d just assumed that was because in his last moments, his brain had been going so incredibly fast.</p><p>A life flashing before your eyes, kind of thing. </p><p>Maybe it wasn’t, though.</p><p>Through the shattered windscreen, and over the crumpled blue metal of his own hood, Evan can just about see the other car. It’s red, he notices, and in pretty much as bad a state as he’d imagine his own is. Or not his own; his mom’s.</p><p>
  <em>Fuck. </em>
</p><p>The state of the cars isn’t really what is important though, Evan reminds himself, it’s the people that are, so he looks himself over once despite nothing hurting, and then, upon finding nothing overly concerning, pulls on the handle and pushes on the door of the car.</p><p>It doesn’t budge.</p><p>He grimaces at it and then at the passenger door because that’s pressed up against a tree so certainly isn’t going to open, and then turns back to give his door a shove with his shoulder.</p><p>For a fraction of a second, he’s certain it hasn’t worked, but then there’s a sort of popping sound and the feeling of something coming free and then he finds himself tumbling out of his wrecked car and onto the dusty asphalt of the road.</p><p>He’d have thought that landing would have hurt more, too.</p><p>It hadn’t hurt though, not at all, and when he picks himself up on surprisingly steady legs, he finds that neither the skin of his wrist that scraped along the road nor the hip he landed on are sore.</p><p>For the first time since the accident, Evan wonders if maybe that fact that nothing hurts is due to shock.</p><p>He’d been in shock after he fell from the tree, and both that and adrenaline are, very briefly, wonderful painkillers. There had be a few seconds after his fall where his racing thoughts had been painfully loud as he processed what he had tried and failed to do, but his body entirely numb. It hadn’t lasted long, the pain had caught up with him before he’d even entirely comprehended what had happened, and then instead of numbness there had been a throb in his head and burning in his arm and an awful, aching agony in his heart.</p><p>Evan wonders if that’s what happening now.</p><p>It he’s in shock.</p><p>It would explain why nothing hurts.</p><p>Why he feels almost entirely numb.</p><p>It wouldn’t explain why the crumpled door of his car is still closed, though, and nor would it explain why through the fractured glass he can see himself still sitting in the driver’s seat.</p><p>Evan blinks at himself.</p><p>And very suddenly he knows he isn’t okay at all.</p><p>In fact, neither of him is okay.</p><p>He’s not in his body which isn’t right, not at all, and the Evan in the car doesn’t look even vaguely okay either. There’s considerably more blood tricking his slack face that could ever warrant him being called okay.</p><p>Around him, people are finally starting to climb from haphazardly parked cars, expressions cautious grim and more than a little panicked. Evan understands why, and he thinks he would probably have a similar expression on his own face if he was a witness to an accident rather than a victim. If he wasn’t too busy staring through the window of his car at his own body.</p><p>“Jane, call 911,” a woman in a navy suit shouts in the distance, and then suddenly, the road is no longer still and silent. The shocked aftermath crumples like a bumper, fractures like a windscreen.</p><p>People run and yell. Phones dial. Someone’s a nurse. More cars arrive. Traffic forms.</p><p>Neither of the Evans move.</p><p>One can’t because he isn’t conscious.</p><p>The other thinks he might be in shock if that is even possible because he now knows he’s not real.</p><p>Nothing feels real either. It all seems so very distant, like he’s above the chaos, a spectator, irrelevant to the event and the aftermath despite being the very epicentre of it. It even sounds far away.</p><p>Muffled.</p><p>Like he’s watching the drama he has caused unfurl through a window.</p><p>There’s a person beside him, Evan realises, a familiar presence dark against the soft grey-glue of the early evening sky. He doesn’t need to look to know who’s there. Or kind of there anyway, because he knows that Connor is just as real as he is at this point</p><p>“Am I dead?” he asks quietly, eyes still fixed on his body. “Is that why I’m here? … Is that why you’re here?”</p><p>Out of the corner of his eye he sees Connor tilt his head a little as though in thought, but before he has time to answer the navy suited woman has arrived. Evan steps backwards out of her way since he’s certain she won’t be able to see him, but he’s distracted and slow and he doesn’t quite move fast enough.</p><p>It turns out not to matter as her heeled shoe and the foot inside go straight through his shin.</p><p>There’s no sensation to it at all.</p><p>Evan shudders.</p><p>The groaning his abused car door makes as it’s roughly pulled open echoes in a way it shouldn’t. So does the woman’s voice as she tries to wake him.</p><p>He doesn’t stir, but then Evan wasn’t expecting him to. He’s dead, surely, that’s why he’s here, isn’t it?</p><p>“You’re not dead,” Connor corrects from behind him, loud and clear but with little interest to his tone. It’s as though he’s commenting on the weather or book or a particularly boring TV drama rather than Evan’s real-life life-or-death situation.</p><p>He kind of deserves that.</p><p>It isn’t as though he reacted entirely sympathetically to Connor’s death.</p><p>“That’s the understatement of the century.”</p><p>“What?” Evan turns to find Connor’s mismatched eyes on him. He looks as though he can’t work out whether he’s angry or amused. “Wait, can you read my thoughts?”</p><p>Connor rolls his eyes and turns back to the aftermath unravelling around them.</p><p>There are more people now, some huddling around the open doors two crumpled cars, some on phones to the emergency services, some dealing with the mounting traffic. Most just stand around looking shocked and upset and like they’re desperate to help but don’t know how.</p><p>The woman in the navy suit is still beside the him in the car. She has blood on her hands, and it takes Evan longer than it should to understand it’s his.</p><p>There’s an awful lot of blood and an awful lot of fear in her eyes as she tries to help him.</p><p>Evan’s hit with the sudden realisation that although he might be alive now, he is very unlikely to be so for long.</p><p>“Am I dying? Is that why I’m here?”</p><p>“Dunno, maybe.” Connor shrugs, still eyeing the outfall with apparent disinterest.</p><p>Which, yeah, okay, Evan understands that, understands why Connor wouldn’t care about him when Evan treated his memory with so little respect, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t hurt by Connor’s apparent lack of interest in answering any of his questions with a sensible answer.</p><p>He just wants to know what’s happening.</p><p>If he’s dead or dying or just losing his mind entirely.</p><p>“Why are you so unhelpful!” Evan snaps in frustration as he runs a hand through his short hair with more force than is necessary. His fingers snag. It doesn’t hurt at all, and somehow, that just upsets him even more.</p><p>Connor doesn’t react to his outburst, just casts him a look and starts to walk away.</p><p>Despite the chaos and the crumpled vehicles and his own body sitting in the car he’s standing beside, it’s Connor Evan stares at as he walks away. He thinks heart would be racing at the possibility of being deserted by the one person who might know what’s happening if he still definitely had one.</p><p>Just as he’s about to call out, an apology ready on his tongue, Connor stops, and bends down to peek in through the passenger window of the red car whose hood is crumpled against his.</p><p>It takes Evan a moment to understand that he’s looking in on the other driver. On the man who had been driving his car on the wrong side of the road and caused the crash Evan is pretty sure has killed him.</p><p>The angle is wrong for him to see Connor’s expression in any sort of detail, but he thinks he might be frowning, and something stirs inside him. Since he’d fallen out of his car through the door, he hadn’t even considered the occupant of the other car.</p><p>“Is he okay?” Evan finds himself asking as he drifts over to join Connor. Without thinking, he’s bent down to look, too, and through the hole in the door, he briefly catches a glimpse of a chubby, grey haired man slumped in his seat. The side of his head is covered with considerably more blood than Evan had expected. The tang of iron that accompanies it is faint despite the window and the windscreen being shattered.</p><p>Evan recoils just as Connor stands and turns to face him. His face is a little twisted.</p><p>“He’s dead.”</p><p>“Oh,” he wheezes, and then, as though in need to confirm it, Evan takes another look through the window, at the body inside and the Samaritans on the other side of the car trying to save the man he now knows can’t be saved. When he stands, he turns to Connor.</p><p>“I don’t feel sad?” he admits, quietly, and it’s true, he doesn’t; he just feels kind of empty, and that in itself feels wrong. Not that that’s the most wrong thing that’s currently happening, but, still. Evan doesn’t like it.</p><p>For the first time, Connor properly looks at him. His expression is curious, searching, and his deep, mismatched eyes feel to almost burn their way through Evan’s skin and into his very soul.</p><p>Maybe they do burn through his skin. Everything else seems to pass through.</p><p>Evan looks away, down at the dark tarmac rather than the crumpled cars and bleeding bodies and the people surrounding them who just want to help.</p><p>After a moment, Connor sighs. “Come on; we’re going to be in the way in a moment,” he says in a tone that sounds maybe a little fed up but is still considerably softer than any he has spoken to Evan in so far.</p><p>Evan frowns at him as he walks away, wondering how he could possibly be in the way, then at the car he’s beside, then at his car and the woman in the navy suit. His eyes eventually land on his own body. There’s a blanket over it now, tucked gently round his shoulders leaving just his head exposed as though they’re trying to keep him warm. That is what you’re meant to do, he supposes, it’s just less relevant than normal because he’s sure he’s dying anyway.</p><p>Evan isn’t sure how he feels about that at all.</p><p>He isn’t really sure how he feels about any of it. He’s numb, just like he had been those first few seconds after he fell out of the tallest tree in Ellison State Park. </p><p>“Do you think ghosts can be in shock?” he wonders out loud, eyes fixed on Connor’s back as he leads the way over to the curb. The question isn’t serious, but it isn’t entirely rhetorical either; if there’s an answer to any of what is happening, Evan would gladly listen.</p><p>Connor glances back, eyes rolling. He beckons Evan to follow with a flick of his hand, and Evan, after taking one final look at the driver of the car he’s sure has ended his life, follows the only person who’s able to see him over to the sidewalk. </p><p> </p><p>It doesn’t take long for the emergency services to arrive, and when they do, they arrive with lights flashing and sirens screaming.</p><p>They don’t sound quite as loud as Evan thinks they should do from so close by.</p><p>It’s the police that get there first, their lights bathing the dismal scene in red and blue and throwing the crumped messes of the cars into sharp relief. They do a good job of highlighting the grim expression of the officers as they cordon off the road and secure the scene and take over first aid from those trying to help.</p><p>An ambulance come next, fighting through the built-up traffic and being led through the cordon, and that’s followed by more police, and then another ambulance, and then a fire truck, and by this point the road is crowded with services and well-lit with red and blue. The people from inside scurry around the scene like ants around a candy.</p><p>It’s chaos, Evan thinks as he numbly watches them work from the sidewalk, but the orderly sort. It reminds him of watching a dance or a play, it’s the sort of scene that looks like pandemonium from the outside despite every person knowing their role and purpose and performing it in perfect synchrony with the others. </p><p>Evan feels kind of sad for them; he’s pretty sure all the effort they’re putting in is for nothing.</p><p>Barely ten minutes after it all started, the fire truck comes into play, and lit by flashing blue and red, the firefighters that emerge from inside proceed to cut the roof off his mom’s battered blue Ford.</p><p>The paramedics continue their dance as the metal roof of the car is removed, two leaning in through the doorway and the third sat behind him. It takes him quite a while to realise that the one in the back seat is holding his head. They’re keeping his spine aligned in case of injury.</p><p>It’s futile, Evan thinks as he rubs the back of a neck that doesn’t hurt but probably should. He’s going to die anyway. He’s certain of it.</p><p>Why would he be there if he wasn’t?</p><p>And it’s then that he realises he isn’t actually numb. He just … isn’t sad.</p><p>Not at all.</p><p>Part of him tries to convince himself it’s because of the shock, because he’s yet to process the insanity of what is happening. The other part knows it’s because not having to live any longer is a bit of a relief.</p><p>Life is tiring. It’s an effort, and even though things had been going better with his mom and although he’s graduated high school and got into community college and found employment, that doesn’t stop existing being utterly exhausting.</p><p>He still struggles with his anxiety. He’s certain he always will, and it will always be an effort to make phone calls, and answer the door, and say thank you to the supermarket attendants, and make decisions about pretty much anything because what if what he chooses is wrong.</p><p>He still struggles with depression too, not to the extent he had before, but there are days when even getting out of bed and into the shower seems like a lot more effort than it’s all worth. He does always get out of bed though, and usually into the shower. His mom would worry if he didn’t.</p><p>So, he decides as he sits beside Connor on the curb, his legs bent up and his arms hugging his knees, it’s almost a good thing that what happened has happened. It’s a relief.</p><p>Well, it isn’t a good thing at all in respect to the other driver, but he was on the wrong side of the road. It was him that caused the crash.</p><p>It doesn’t take as long as he thought it would for them to cut the roof off his car. The procedure is careful and cautious yet unbelievably well-rehearsed with each person seeming to know exactly where they need to stand and what they should be doing to safely and quickly remove the roof from a crumpled, ruined vehicle.</p><p>Evan sits as he watches himself being carefully manoeuvred from the car on a scoop, watches as they brace his head with yellow foam blocks and secure his body to the trolley. He can’t really see what’s going on from the distance, and the definition of what little he can is lost in the dim glow of the recently set sun and the flashing red and blue of the lights.</p><p>He’s relieved, if he’s honest.</p><p>Judging by the urgent conversation of the paramedics and the yells confirming the decision to intubate that come shortly after he’s secured, he isn’t doing all that well, and he isn’t sure he really wants to see himself in such a state.</p><p>He hadn’t really considered that they were going to take him away in an ambulance until they start to wheel his trolley towards it.</p><p>Wide eyed and with a swear on his lips, he throws himself to his feet with as much force as he thinks a ghost can and starts towards them. It doesn’t take him more than a few steps to realise Connor isn’t following. He’s still sat on the curb, watching the police as they analyse the scene with more interest than he’s had in any other of the proceedings.</p><p>“Connor?”</p><p>Connor slowly looks round, eyebrows raised in question over an otherwise expressionless face. If anything, he looks bored out of his mind. Evan would probably consider that rude if he wasn’t too preoccupied with the fact the paramedics are making surprisingly rapid progress towards the ambulance.</p><p>Following them is almost certainly unnecessary; he’s aware he’s dying and there’s nothing he can do about that, but he also can’t just stand there and watch his body vanish into an ambulance without him. It feels wrong. He knows he’s going to be permanently separated from both this earth and his own body soon, though, knows it’ll go to the morgue and then into a coffin and then into the ground and he’ll go … he’ll go wherever it is spirits go.  </p><p>That isn’t something he’s ever considered before simply because he never believed there was life after death.</p><p>Maybe there isn’t, maybe he’ll just disappear when his body finally loses its grip on life, but also, maybe there is, and he’ll go … which way would he go? He isn’t all that sure if he’s a good person or not.</p><p>He tries not to dwell on it.</p><p>“Shouldn’t we go too?” he asks agitatedly, pointing back at the ambulance behind him with a surprisingly steady hand.</p><p>“I don’t think it matters,” Connor says with a shrug, but under Evan’s frown he does slowly uncoil his lanky limbs and push himself to his feet. Evan had forgotten quite how tall he was.</p><p>They start towards the ambulance, hurrying through the red and blue lights and around police officers and crumpled vehicles. Or Evan hurries, terrified his body will soon be leaving without him. Connor doesn’t rush but he keeps up all the same, and Evan wonders if it’s due to his lanky legs or if some other sort of force is at play.</p><p>“I don’t think you’re a bad person, if it helps,” Connor clarifies as he walks.</p><p>It takes Evan a moment to place what he’s saying, and even longer to conclude that’s kind of a compliment considering who it’s coming from.</p><p>He frowns all the same, though, and kicks ineffectually at a rock as he passes. “You probably should, you know. After what I did to your family. What I did to you.” </p><p>Beside him, Connor shrugs. “People are complicated. Mental health is a bitch,” he says, and somehow, he doesn’t sound quite as bored as he had before. </p><p>Evan sighs, because while that is true, it doesn’t really answer his question. “Yeah, but where do complicated people go?” he asks quietly, glaring at his converse as they refuse to crush the glass littering the road below.</p><p>Connor glances over, just give him a curious sort of frown in reply. It seems even if he knows the answer, he doesn’t feel the need to share.</p><p>Whether it’s a coincidence or not, Evan doesn’t quite know, but they slip inside the ambulance doors just before they close. His shoulders sag briefly in relief before he lets out a choked sort of laugh at the realisation that it wouldn’t have mattered even if the doors had closed before they got there.</p><p>He can walk through walls now, or fall through car doors, anyway.</p><p>
  <em>Fuck. </em>
</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. part 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Hi, so I really put Heidi through an emotional wringer in this chapter, I apologise in advance.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There’s something undeniably awful about watching paramedics trying to save your life from an outside perspective. (It might be equally awful from an internal perspective too, but Evan’s never had his life saved by paramedics before, let alone whilst he was awake.)</p><p>At least when he was back sitting on the curb and watching from both physical and emotional distance of the sidewalk, he had been able to kind of pretend that it wasn’t him they were working on.</p><p>He can’t pretend it isn’t from inside the ambulance, though; he can so very clearly see his own face on the body they are working to save as the vehicle speeds through the streets, the sirens screaming and the lights flashing overhead. It’s in a rush, hurrying to a hospital, and from the urgent words of the paramedics, he understands why.</p><p>It should be terrifying and distressing watching the paramedics trying so desperately to save a life that he’s sure cannot be saved, but it isn’t, it’s something else, a feeling that he doesn’t know how to describe because despite the trauma of the situation, it’s his own features he can see beneath the bandages and blood.</p><p>Maybe that’s because what he’s feeling isn’t a feeling people are ever meant to have to describe.</p><p>The whole situation is surreal, like a nightmare, the sort of thing that is so bizarre and awful that it couldn’t possibly be happening.</p><p>And yet it is.</p><p>Or Evan thinks it is anyway. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe this is all just a dream, a result of brain damage he’s sustained in the crash or his brain’s last spectacular misfire as it shuts down completely.</p><p>He considers that for a moment, and Connor instantly scoffs from beside him, clearly laughing at the idea that the insanity he’s experiencing might not be actually happening. Evan isn’t sure he believed it might not be real either, simply because he doesn’t think his brain could possibly conjure up such detailed insanity. </p><p>He thinks a Connor he’d invent would be more sympathetic too; the one in his head from before had always been understanding at least.</p><p>This Connor seems entirely uninterested in the situation as he stands in an ambulance, leaning casually against the door and picking at a hangnail. He looks bored, like he’s watching paint dry rather than Evan’s body slowly losing its grip on life, and Evan thinks he’d be hurt by that if he wasn’t too preoccupied by the fact he’s pretty sure he’s watching himself die.</p><p>Disturbed but unable to look away, he stands with his back pressed against the same door Connor is leaning so casually against, and watches as the paramedics breathe for him and insert lines and hook up monitors and inject medicines he doesn’t even recognise the names of let alone know what are for. He sees the panic in their eyes and the sadness hidden behind professional masks and hears the urgency in their voices as they try to keep his heart beating productively.</p><p>He hears the moment it stops too, the moment the unusually fast beeps of the machines start to stutter and skip and speed and he hears the yells of the paramedics as they call for CPR and paddles, and he hears the crack of a rib as they push a little too hard trying to save his life.</p><p>Evan finds his hand going to his chest even though it doesn’t hurt.</p><p>Not in the physical sense anyway.</p><p>He looks away as they shock him, as the paramedics shout ‘clear’ just before his body twitches on the bed, and glances pleadingly up to Connor instead. </p><p>“I don’t want to watch myself die,” he finds himself saying, his voice high and wavering because it turns out there is very much a difference between accepting death with open arms and watching it arrive.</p><p>It isn’t something he wants to see.</p><p>Not like this anyway.</p><p>Connor looks down at him for a just moment, eyebrows raised just a fraction over apathetic mismatched eyes, but says nothing at all.</p><p>Eventually, Evan turns back to his body and watches as the paramedics just about manage to keep him tethered to life until he reaches the hospital.</p><p> </p><p>Evan stays with his body as they take him through to the Resus unit of the ER, and he stays as they asses him and then very quickly send him off for an CT scan. He stays through the scan, he’s pretty sure the radiation can do nothing to harm him further seeing as he isn’t exactly solid at the moment, and he stays as he goes briefly back to Resus and tries not to listen as they discuss his condition in urgent, muffled voices. </p><p>Evan doesn’t follow his body into surgery. He ends up sat in a chair in the waiting area outside which is daft he knows, and Connor ends up slumped in a chair beside him. He looks almost fed up with the situation, and Evan would wonder how this could be any more boring than the nothing he’s been doing for the past 19 months if he wasn’t too keyed up. His chest and shoulders are tight and tense and his leg jostles anxiously as he sits there picking at his cuticles in a way he knows would hurt and bleed if he was still alive.</p><p> </p><p>It’s a little ironic that his mom, when she finally arrives, falls shakily into the other chair next to the one he’s sat in. She looks small and pale and terrified and Evan wants nothing more than to reach out and hold her hand or pull her into a hug even though he knows from experience that isn’t something that can happen.</p><p>He sits beside her though, keeping her company as she stares at the clock on the wall and bites at her nails and occasionally wipes at her blotchy eyes with the sleeve of her hoodie. She can’t see him, he knows that, and so his presence is likely doing nothing to help her, but it makes him feel just a little better all the same.</p><p> </p><p>It takes nine hours for Evan to be reunited with his body. It’s in a bed in the Intensive Care Unit, and although he knew he wasn’t going to look well, he’d heard the exhausted looking surgeon telling his mom so in corridor outside, it’s still a shock to see himself looking so small and pale and still. There’s a thin blue blanket keeping most of his body hidden from view, but the tube snaking from between his lips to the whirring, clicking machines keeping him alive is more than visible and so is the thick bandaging wrapped around a good portion of his head.</p><p>It’s a shock for his mom too, and while she doesn’t quite cry, her posture falls further, and her tired face pales, and her eyes develop the shiny sort of sheen that comes with tears. She’s used to seeing people as sick as he is, but he thinks it’s probably different when it’s someone so close.</p><p>They let her sit beside him and hold his hand while they quietly, gently explain that although the surgery went as well as could be expected, he’s still very poorly, and that his life is very much still hanging in the balance. They’re taking things as they come, they say, one hour at a time.</p><p>Heidi doesn’t allow herself to cry until the surgeon leaves, and even then, it’s silent. She stands beside his bed and holds his hand as soundless tears of heartbreak trace an unstopped salty trail over her cheeks.</p><p>“I’m sorry, Evan,” she whispers, voice wet and wavering as she reaches up to gently rub a thumb over his cheek. “I’m so sorry.”</p><p>Evan stands in the corner of the room and wishes he could do something, anything, to numb her pain even a little.</p><p> </p><p>Slowly, hours pass and night breaks into day. The hospital awakens around them, but the Evan in the bed stays still. The only sign he’s even alive is beeping of his heart monitor and the rising and falling of his chest in time with the mechanical hiss-click, hiss-click of the ventilator.</p><p>Despite his unconsciousness, Heidi stays sat beside him, one hand holding his and the other rubbing softly over his cheek. She talks to him whilst he lays there, and her words are thick and chocked as they almost beg him to wake.</p><p>They hurt Evan to hear, but he stays because he just can’t leave her alone whilst she hurts. He isn’t all that sure he could leave even if he wanted to anyway.</p><p>Even Connor, sitting in the corner and looking bored out of his mind, stays.  </p><p> </p><p>Somehow, his mom gets hold of his medical file, and from over her shoulder, Evan learns the emergency surgery he had been rushed into the day before had been to patch a tear in his liver and repair a punctured lung. They’d performed surgery on his head, too, to realign the pieces of his fractured skull and release the pressure caused by a bleed in his brain. As he reads, hovering beside his silently sobbing mom, he learns he also has a bleeding kidney, two fractured vertebrae, three fractured ribs, a shattered ankle, and ironically, a broken left wrist.</p><p>He’s a mess.</p><p>Broken.</p><p>Wrecked just like the car.</p><p>No wonder his mom is so sad. No wonder his doctors are so worried.</p><p>Evan doesn’t feel any of it, though. Not the fractures, nor the bruises, nor the internal bleeding, nor the apparently concerning amount of pressure in his skull, and he thinks even if he could it would feel like nothing compared to the pain in his heart that grows a little more with every passing hour.</p><p>His mom is suffering, and it’s agony to see.</p><p> </p><p>Day turns into night turns into day.</p><p>A too pale Jared visits.</p><p>His dad phones.</p><p>Heidi keeps an unwavering vigil beside his bed.</p><p>Evan watches it all and wonders how long until the inevitable.</p><p>He tries asking Connor, but Connor doesn’t look up from the pamphlet he’s reading let alone answer, so Evan assumes he doesn’t know.</p><p> </p><p>Time doesn’t quite pass right anymore, he realises eventually. He can remember things if he thinks back, but time doesn’t seem to pass as he sits there. It’s as though it doesn’t hold any relevance to him anymore, as though he’s only present in those important moments when he has something to see or hear or think. </p><p>It’s like breathing now, kind of, since that isn’t right either. He doesn’t miss breathing, but he isn’t sure whether that’s because he isn’t aware he’s doing it, or because he isn’t and it just doesn’t matter anymore. It certainly doesn’t seem a problem when he experimentally holds his breath, anyway.</p><p>Time doesn’t pass in fragments for his mom. She stays the whole three days that have passed, a full 72 hours for her whilst only moments for him. It’s noticeable in her tired, bruised eyes and the worried lines on her brow and the knots that are growing in her hair. She leaves his bedside only when forced to, too scared to leave for long whilst his life hangs so precariously in the balance.</p><p> </p><p>Nothing about Evan’s condition changes in those 72 hours. His brain keeps sluggishly bleeding and his lungs stay too weak for them to wean him off the ventilator, and while his injured organs don’t start bleeding uncontrollably again, the doctors can’t see any signs of healing on his scans.</p><p>They don’t say anything, but Evan knows from their frowns they don’t quite understand.</p><p> </p><p>“Why am I here, I don’t want to see her like this!” he cries on the fourth day of watching his mom slowly breaking at his bedside. His voice is tight with upset and frustration, and Evan knows his eyes would be burning with tears if he could feel anything physical at all.</p><p>When he turns to look, he finds Connor’s gaze has lifted from the leaflet on mental health he had been apathetically reading for the past three days and is looking at him with interest.</p><p>“You’re here because you need to understand,” he replies, before turning back to his pamphlet.</p><p>“Understand what?”</p><p>Connor doesn’t look up or reply but rather just tilts his head towards Heidi. She’s talking quietly to her Evan as she stands beside his bed, rubbing a tender thumb over his forehead just below the bandages that encase his skull. Her eyes are wet and swollen with tears and the skin beneath is nearly as bruised as his.</p><p>“She’s upset, I know,” he snaps, his voice breaking, “I just- I don’t need to watch to know she doesn’t want to lose me. She loves me, I’m her son, of course she doesn’t want me to die even though-” Abruptly, he breaks off and turns away, runs his hands through his hair with more force than necessary because something about Connor’s expression that had made him know saying his mom would be better off without him would not have been a very good idea.</p><p>Only afterwards does he realise he might as well have finished his sentence. Connor can apparently read his thoughts, anyway.</p><p> </p><p>Evan sits back down eventually, goes back to watching his mom and wishing dying would hurry up for her sake more than his. It’s cruel for the universe to make her suffer for so long whilst they wait for the inevitable.</p><p>Not that she knows it’s inevitable; she still waits in hope.</p><p>He knows it’s inevitable though; why else would he be there as a ghost if it wasn’t?  </p><p>“You’re not a ghost,” Connor mutters over the top of his pamphlet, and Evan sighs in irritation and goes back to watching his mom with a heavy heart.</p><p> </p><p>Two more days pass.</p><p>Evan doesn’t die, but he doesn’t heal either.</p><p>His lungs still won’t breathe, and his brain still bleeds, and his injured organs and fractured bones don’t start to heal as they should.</p><p>The doctors pretend to understand when Evan knows they really don’t.</p><p>They increase his dosage of antibiotics as though that will do anything to help.</p><p> </p><p>“Why is this taking so long?” Evan cries on the sixth day. He’s on his feet, pacing soundlessly, his brow furrowed in frustration. “It’s just- it’s cruel. She shouldn’t have to suffer for this long for nothing.”</p><p>Connor looks up from the pamphlet on teen suicide he's been reading at the outburst. Across the room, his mom’s eyes don’t leave his too still body.</p><p>“It’s because you haven’t learnt yet,” Connor says simply, and Evan turns around to glare only to find he’s looked away again.</p><p>“Learnt what? What am I meant to learn from watching this?” he demands, distressed, before a thought flits through his mind. “Wait, is this about the crash?” Connor’s eyes flash up, their boredom replaced with an interest Evan takes to mean yes. “But that’s- that wasn’t my fault! This-” he raises a hand to indicate the bed- “Connor, that was an accident, this isn’t- this isn’t my faul-”</p><p>Evan finds himself cut off by the high pitched wail of one of the machines beside his bed. It’s piercingly loud and awfully startling, and when he turns, he finds Heidi on her feet. After a second, she’s screaming too. He starts towards her, terrified and panicked, just as a nurse bursts through the door yelling to the people behind her that he’s crashing.</p><p>Very suddenly, the small, whitewashed room is full. Alongside Heidi and Connor and the two Evans, there are a dozen doctors and nurses and even more equipment than there was before. It’s so very noisy too, with the staff yelling and the machines wailing and Heidi hysterically begging him to be okay. Connor says nothing, he stays in the corner, watching with apparent disinterest.</p><p>The room is suddenly very busy too, and instinctively, Evan scrambles backwards, trying to get out of the way of the medical staff as they rush to clear the space around his bed. Distracted by the chaos and the high pitched beeping and the sobbing of his mom, he doesn’t quite move fast enough, and as they rush past, the shoulder of a mousy young doctor catches his. Evan expects it to go through, that’s what happens now, he knows so, except, somehow, it doesn’t.</p><p>They instead collide, hitting with much more force than seems physically possible given the doctor’s size, and although the doctor appears not to even notice, Evan unexpectedly finds himself knocked violently backwards.  </p><p>As he falls, he catches sight of his mom’s tear streaked face and her wide, terrified eyes, and sees and the grim expressions of the doctors surrounding his bed. He finds Connor just before he hits the floor, finds those eternally bored, heterochromatic eyes watching him and heavy with a meaning Evan doesn't understand.</p><p>Milliseconds later, before he's even had time to consider what that meaning might be, his head hits the tiles with an audible crack, and everything goes white once again.  </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Part 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>One last apology, to you and to Heidi, I promise.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Evan’s in his hospital room. He knows it well, he’s spent six days there already, give or take. As usual, Connor stands beside him, his expression as bored as ever and maybe a little frustrated, and his mom is there too. She’s red eyed and sobbing as she sits beside a bed that is suddenly empty.</p><p>Evan’s breath catches in his throat at the sight of it.</p><p>Beside his mom sits a doctor, one he has seen sat beside her countless times before. He’s dark skinned and balding a little, a serious but kind sort of man, and most importantly at the moment, Evan supposes, in charge of overseeing his care. It’s him who makes the decisions, him who tells his mom the outcomes of his scans, him who tries his best to answer her questions even when there is no good news for to tell.</p><p>He’s the one who’s going to have to console his mom when the inconsolable happens.</p><p>He might be attempting that now, Evan thinks numbly, since his hand rests on her upper arm as she cries, providing a comfort that doesn’t appear to help.</p><p>“I’m so sorry,” he’s saying as she sobs, his tone soft and professional but achingly sad. “We did everything we could.”</p><p>His mom lets out a wail, that makes Evan feels suddenly very cold.</p><p>Like his heart is made of ice.</p><p>He wonders if it might break like his mom’s is as he watches.</p><p>“I died?” he whispers hollowly, his words lilted as a question despite having known it was coming. He’d known so for days, since he fell from the wreckage of his car and looked up to see his body still slumped in the driving seat, but it still doesn’t feel real that it has finally happened.  </p><p>It doesn’t feel real that he’s dead.</p><p>It must feel real for his mom though, because she hangs almost limp in the doctor’s arms, sobbing uncontrollably and shaking her head as her heart shatters. She looks so sad, so broken, wrecked entirely like the small blue Ford Evan had been borrowing from her on the evening this all started. Just for a moment, Evan wonders how it is she could ever recover.</p><p>He knows she will though, given time. Wounds heal, scar tissue forms.</p><p>Scar tissue has benefits over normal skin in some ways; it doesn’t age, doesn’t form wrinkles, and Evan’s always worried he’s going to give his mom worry lines because she frowns at him so often.</p><p>Not that her worrying about him is something that can happen anymore, and he tries to focus on that rather than her utterly heart-breaking, gut-wrenching sobs as she mourns.</p><p>She’s crying now, but she’ll be better later. Better without him than he was before. </p><p>She’ll be better off in the long run.</p><p>He knows so.</p><p>He doesn’t tell Connor so, but Connor looks down with this exasperated expression anyway. He rolls his irritated, mismatches eyes and then, unexpectedly, the room round them blurs. It morphs and changes and then, suddenly, Evan’s at home.</p><p>He’s standing beside his kitchen table.</p><p>The room is a mess; plates are piled by the sink and clothing sits in a heap by the washing machine. The stack of recycling on the counter is starting to look more than a little precarious. Heidi sits at the table, her hands around a mug of something she’s yet to drink and her eyes fixed unseeingly out the window. She doesn’t look all that much better kept than the kitchen, with her eyes red-rimmed and bruised against her too pale skin and her hair unwashed. Her t-shirt is clean but old and creased as though she’s down to the very dregs of her wardrobe.</p><p>Evan doesn’t know how long has passed since that day at the hospital, but clearly it hasn’t been long enough for his mom to even start to heal.</p><p>Janet Kleinman is in the kitchen too, sat beside her at the table with an empty mug in her own hands.</p><p>“Heidi, your tea’s getting cold,” she says gently, reaching over to cup his mom’s hand in her own.</p><p>His mom blinks, comes out of her trance a little, and robotically looks down at her mug. Her blue eyes are wet and distant and have yet to lose that haunted look Evan had seen in Cynthia Murphy’s that day he had been called to the principal’s office. </p><p>“I- sorry,” she almost whispers, her voice raw, and then she lifts her mug with a shaky hand as though to drink, but she’s crying silently again before she can even take a sip.</p><p>Janet takes her hand again, this time properly, but says nothing to comfort her.</p><p>Evan, with a heavy heart, realises there is nothing she could say to help.</p><p>It’s too soon.</p><p>Her loss too raw.</p><p>He wonders how long it will take for there to be something that can make her feel even a little better.</p><p>It’ll happen one day, but Evan doesn’t know when.  </p><p>The floor tilts, and the room blurs, and then Evan is outside.</p><p>The early spring sun is shining high in a clear blue sky. It’s very bright, very warm compared to the white of the hospital and the grey of their kitchen, and the green of the grass and pink of the blossom filled trees come across as just as much of a striking contrast when compared to the black of the headstones beneath.</p><p>The new black dress his mom is wearing looks striking in comparison to her pales skin, too.</p><p>Evan stares at her, at her brave face and swollen, red-rimmed eyes and feels his heart drop. He knows what’s coming.</p><p>They’re in a quiet corner of the cemetery very close to where Evan knows Heidi’s dad to be buried. Standing with his mom around a simple coffin made of a light coloured wood, are his dad and step-mom and grandma and his dad’s parents. Janet Kleinman is there too, and so are Jared and Alana and Zoe and Mr and Mrs Murphy along with a dozen or so people from work and even a huddle of old classmates and teachers from school. </p><p>Just Connor stands beside him.</p><p>“I didn’t think this many people would come,” Evan says, feeling hollow as he watches the ceremony silently take place. He can’t hear what is said, it’s all so distant, but he can see the tears and the tissues and his mom biting her lip as she wills her composure not to crumble completely.</p><p>Her mask break later that night, after the quiet wake Evan catches snippets of has finished and the house has emptied. Evan stands in the corner of his room as she mourns on his bed, wishing he could both comfort her and leave and being unable to do neither.</p><p>“She’ll be okay, though, eventually?” Evan finds himself half asking, half saying.</p><p>Connor looks over to glare and then Evan’s falling through the floor again.</p><p>He ends up in his dad’s house, and he isn’t all that sure how he knows that because he hasn’t visited since he moved. His dad is sitting at the island counter in the kitchen with a beer in his hand and a frown on his lips. Sandra sits opposite, a glass of wine in one hand and her other holding his.</p><p>“I should have tried harder,” he sighs harshly, his voice just a little thick. “I should have tried whilst I had the chance.”</p><p>Even without context, Evan knows it’s him who his dad thinks he should have tried harder with, and something stirs in his gut. He doesn’t understand it; they hadn’t been close, not even back when he was little, and after he had left, they hadn’t really stayed in contact at all, so it isn’t like anything in his dad’s life has changed with his death.</p><p>He’s clearly sad though, mourning, even, which Evan eventually realises does make sense in a way; even though he hasn’t really lost Evan, he never knew him, he has just lost his first born son. A son he’s mostly ignored, sure, but a son he’s had all the same. A son he could have contacted had he ever wanted to. Evans supposes that’s how it works though, isn’t it? You don’t miss something until it’s gone, and even then you’re missing the idea rather than the thing itself. People don’t like being told what they can’t have, and Evan thinks that’s what’s happening now.</p><p>His dad doesn’t miss him, why would he, they haven’t spoken by more than text in years, but he misses the idea of him, misses the son he’ll now never get to know.</p><p>The room blurs and the floor tilts, and Evan falls and then he’s in Jared’s bedroom. There are bags on the floor and a suitcase is propped up against the wall. Jared sits on his bed wearing a burgundy MIT hoodie and a lost sort of expression. He looks around his room, at the empty bookshelves and the void beneath his TV where his X-box used to stand, before his eyes come to rest on his desk. He stands and goes to it, stares at the pinboard screwed to the wall behind, and then gives an old, faded photo of two small boys a gentle prod.</p><p>“Why the fuck did you leave, Ev?” he says, voice uneven and thick with emotion despite Jared insisting he never cries. He wipes at his eyes with the sleeve of his hoodie, and Evan knows if he knew he were being watched he would blame his wet eyes on an eyelash. “Why did you leave me here alone?”</p><p>Evan almost wonders why Jared is upset, why he visited him in the hospital. They weren’t friends, Jared told him so, but they had grown up together all the same. They had been as close as brothers once upon a time, thick as thieves at elementary school, and still best friends in middle. It was only after puberty hit that Jared chose a popularity of sorts over friendship and Evan was left to deal with high school alone.</p><p>They hadn’t even spoken in over a year, not since the Connor project so spectacularly imploded, but it still hurts to see him cry. </p><p>It hurts to hear him blame Evan for leaving too, and he wants to tell Jared that he didn’t, that it wasn’t his choice, but then everything changes and suddenly Evan is in another room he recognises. It’s a bedroom, one that was, for a few months, more familiar than his own. Zoe sits on her bed, her phone held to her ear with a shaking hand.</p><p>“I can’t stop thinking about it,” she says quietly into the phone. Just as Evan’s mom had, she sounds a little haunted. “What if- Lana, what if it was an accident?” Her voice cracks and she wipes angrily at her shiny eyes and Evan feels almost physically sick seeing her in pain over him. She shouldn’t be hurting for him after what he did to her.</p><p>She shouldn’t be hurting at all.</p><p>Evan looks away, up to Connor because doesn’t want to see her upset at all, just like he doesn’t want to see his mom or his dad or Jared or Alana cry over him either. It hurts. It’s agony.</p><p>“Why is this happening?” he asks, distressed.</p><p>Connor turns to him and frowns. “You still don’t know?” he asks, his tone weighty in a way Evan thinks he should understand but doesn’t.  </p><p>The scene morphs and changes and then suddenly they’re outside again, back in the graveyard they had been in before. It’s a little later in the year now, Evan can tell so by the scorched summer grass and the growing apples in the trees and the headstone now settled in the grass just a little way away with his name on it.</p><p>On the path beside it, his mom stands, and at her side, unexpectedly, is Cynthia Murphy. Evan blinks at her for a moment, at her closeness to his own mom, and then turns to Connor. He’s doesn’t seem surprised to see his mom standing beside Evan’s. If anything, he just looks bored and maybe a little irritated. </p><p>“I got the police report through this morning,” Heidi says quietly, voice carefully level, as she stares at the grave. “They said the brake lights weren’t burst.”</p><p>Cynthia turns to her in question. There’s a frown on her brow. “I don’t know what that means,” she admits tentatively.</p><p>Heidi shakes her head, her expression pinched. “It means they weren’t on when he crashed,” she explains, her voice suddenly strained and wet and wrong. Cynthia puts an arm around her shoulders just as Heidi lets out a wet sob of a sigh.</p><p>“Why weren’t they on?” she asks, and just as she starts to cry the outside warps away and suddenly, they’re in a dorm room, and Alana is sitting at a desk.</p><p>A laptop, silver and smart, sits open in front of her, and her eyes are fixed on a webpage that is awfully familiar despite the fact Evan hasn’t set eyes on it in a good 18 months now. He hadn’t wanted to. Hadn’t been able to.</p><p>It’s changed a little since he’s last seen it, become neater, more professional looking, a sign of Alana’s continued hard work and dedication to a site she herself had known was fraudulent because it had helped so many who didn’t. What has also changed though, is the number of tabs along the top, five in the place of the four that had been there when he’d last seen it.</p><p>There’s Connor’s tab, and the donations tab, and the helpline tab, and the background tab, and now, where there hadn’t been before, there’s one with his own name on too. It’s the tab Alana is editing at the moment, typing his name and the dates of his birth and death below a picture his mom had taken of him the summer before. Her eyes are focused on the screen as she types, her expression set in concentration, but there’s just something about it that looks a little sad, too, like it hurts her to be typing what she is.</p><p>It hurts him to see his name there too. It shouldn’t be there.</p><p>“Why do I get a tab?” Evan asks quietly, frowning. “I don’t deserve one, and I didn’t-”</p><p>The floor has vanished from beneath him before he’s even finished his sentence, and then he’s back in his room. It’s exactly as he left it, his bed still unmade and worn but not dirty jeans and hoodies on the floor. His mom stands there, a box in her hands and a frown on her lips and tears in her eyes, but before he’s even worked out what she’s doing, the scene slips and changes and he’s back in Jared’s bedroom.</p><p>Jared’s sitting on his bed, frowning at the dated Wii game pixilating his TV screen. It’s Mario Kart he’s playing. Or not playing, Evan belatedly realises, since the remote lays limp in his hands as he stares at the character selection screen and the two Miis who stand there. Jared’s is there, its cartoon expression beaming in contrast to its owner’s, and Evan’s is beside it. The hair is lighter than how it is now, properly blonde, just like how it was when he was little and was close enough to Jared when they used to play games at each other’s houses. Evan’s stomach churns guiltily and everything spins, and then he’s in a lecture theatre.</p><p>At the front of the room Alana is doing a presentation, and although Evan can’t quite hear what she’s saying, he can read enough of the title on the board behind her to know she’s talking about teenage suicide. He can see her expression clearly enough to know whatever she’s talking about is coming from her heart. For a moment, he frowns, pained by her upset and wishing he could hear what she’s saying, but then the colours around him blur then he’s back in his living room.</p><p>His mom is curled up beneath a blanket on the sofa, looking tired and sad as an episode of Star Trek plays on the telly. It isn’t a show she used to watch, and Evan wonders if she just hadn’t cared enough to change the channel. Star Trek isn’t a show he’s watched much of either, but he does know it’s Sulu on the screen. He kind of knows why her expression crumples just a little more when someone call out to him too.</p><p>The world tilts, moving quicker than before, and then he’s in a park, one that’s pretty but unfamiliar. In the field, his little half-siblings run, and his dad watches them play with an expression which isn’t quite as happy as it should be. It’s gone before he can really understand what he saw.</p><p>Around him scenes flit and change, each clip passing by quicker and quicker until they’re almost too brief for him to see let alone comprehend. He see’s flickers of his mom alone at the table with her head in her hands, his grandma gently thumbing the frame of a photo of a blonde haired boy, Alana making a speech at graduation, Zoe sitting on a bench surrounded by trees, Jared frowning as he walks past the overgrown garden where they used to play. Through the clips, he sees people age and change, he sees Jared’s hair thin and his dad’s kids turn into teenagers and his mom’s wrinkles form around her empty blue eyes.</p><p>She always seems sad when he sees her, hollow almost, and it takes him a while to realise maybe she isn’t going to recover as he thought she would. Maybe none of them will.</p><p>Life will continue, the world will keep spinning, but maybe there will always be that small, Evan sized gap in each of their lives.</p><p>They haven’t quite forgotten him like he expected them to, and he thinks about that as he watches their lives flicker by, thinks about their sadness. Their aches caused by scar tissue formed from wounds that never quite healed.</p><p>There’s still pain in his mom’s eyes even years down the line as she sits alone and wet cheeked on the sofa on what he can see by the calendar would have been his 30<sup>th</sup> birthday. She doesn’t look well, doesn’t look happy or healthy. She doesn’t look better off without him and it hurts.</p><p>He once said to her that he was ruining her life, and now he knows he has.</p><p>He doesn’t think he can bear it anymore.</p><p>Doesn’t think his heart could stand to see them suffer any longer when their suffering is entirely his fault.</p><p>“Stop it, Connor, I don’t want to see this anymore!” he cries, and then suddenly, the spinning images stop and they’re standing in Ellison State Park.</p><p>The air is warm and dry, and the sun is bright as it shines through the canopy in dappled patches. The leafed trees rustle softly in the gentle breeze and the birds in their branches sing. The smell of midsummer pollen is heavy in the air.</p><p>Evan looks around and knows exactly where he is.</p><p>Connor stays beside him as he walks the last few minutes to a tree.</p><p>“Why are we here?”</p><p>“Why are you asking? You already know,” Connor says, and he doesn’t sound bored or irritated like he had before, just maybe a little tied.</p><p>Evan says nothing else because Connor is right; he does know.</p><p>They get to a tree, one that’s tall and strong and achingly familiar, but now nailed to the trunk where there wasn’t before is a plaque. Evan runs his fingers over the name that’s written there. It’s kind of ironic that they pinned his memorial to that particular tree.</p><p>“How so?” Connor asks, his tone too casual, and Evan’s finger pauses in the track.</p><p>“Because I said it was an accident,” he says after a moment, almost unwilling to admit why even though he knows for sure that Connor already knows.</p><p>“You said you fell.”</p><p>“I know. But I didn’t. It wasn’t an accident.” He pauses, summons his courage. “And maybe- maybe it wasn’t an accident this time either. Maybe… maybe I didn’t do as much to stop it as I could have done.”</p><p>Connor looks at him and for once, he’s smiling. “Finally,” he says, sounding relieved, exhausted, like he’s reached the end of a marathon, and he rolls his eyes and then suddenly, Evan’s back in the hospital room.</p><p>It’s quiet and still, no alarms blaring or medical teams racing. His mom still sits beside his bed. The Evan in it still unconscious and he still breathes using a machine, but his heart is still beating a steady rhythm, too. </p><p>The Evan standing in the middle of the room feels almost out of breath like he’s just run a marathon or riding out the tail end of a panic attack.</p><p>“Is this even real?” he asks quietly, frowning as he looks around the room. “Am I really dying?”</p><p>Connor stands beside him, and for once, he doesn’t look disinterested or angry or frustrated. Instead, there is an air of finality about him.</p><p>“I don’t know,” he answers, his voice carefully neutral and his expression blank but curious. “Do you want it to be?”</p><p>Evan looks at the bed, at his unmoving form and his mom siting silent and sad beside it. She still looks sad, gut-wrenchingly so, but not as broken and hopeless as the mom he had seen in the future. Her eyes don’t leave the boy on the bed as he watches, and her hand holds his unbroken one. The other rubs over his cheek, brushing at his skin just below the bandages that encase his head. The skull inside is broken, the brain inside still bleeding. He takes it all in. Considers her sadness and his eternal hopelessness and the mess he has made of his body, then sighs because he knows the answer.</p><p>“This is going to hurt, isn’t it?” He stares at his mom as he quietly asks a question he already knows the answer to.</p><p>Connor looks at him for moment, then shrugs.  </p><p>“Yeah, probably,” he agrees casually, indifferently</p><p>Evan thinks he probably deserves that.</p><p>Resigned, he nods grimly, and turns back to take one final look at his mom breaking beside his bed. His eyes are still on her when the room warps and everything blurs once again.</p><p>This time, he sees colours and brightness, patches of dark instead of white as he falls. There are flickers of memories, snapshots of things and people and places. Snippets of his life. He tries to watch them as they pass, as his life quite literally flashes before his eyes, but it’s too bright, too fast, and he can’t make out more than a few familiar faces growing and aging beside his own. It only lasts a moment, or maybe it lasts a lifetime he can’t tell, but then it’s over, and Evan finds himself back in his car once again.</p><p>His hands are on the wheel and the pedals are solid beneath his feet. There is a car, red and wavering and dangerous, on his side of the road. Evan looks at it, closes his eyes, and does what he knows he has to do.</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Part 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>For some reason, Evan isn’t all that surprised when he opens his bedroom door to find Connor Murphy lazing idly on his windowsill. In the dim room, he’s more silhouette than person, a shadowy form dark against blue curtains illuminated by the streetlight behind, and the soft glow cast by the lamp on Evan’s bedside table does more at highlighting his sharp features than lighting his unreadable expression.</p><p>It’s an intimidating appearance, all dark clothes and shaded angles with heavy boots carelessly pressed against the wall, and the fact he’s appeared there from nowhere would be eerie enough to send any sane person running especially considering he’s dead, but well, maybe Evan isn’t a sane person after all.</p><p>Not that he didn’t already know that.</p><p>For a long, breathless second, Evan lingers in the doorway, the damp coolness of his recently refilled water bottle leeching through his dressing gown pocket, and then unsure but not alarmed, he steps into his room.</p><p>“I was beginning to think I’d imagined you,” he says quietly as he closes the door behind him so as not to wake his sleeping mom. “Was beginning to question my sanity.”</p><p>Connor glances over from the window, flicks his hair out of eyes that seems to glint even in the dim lighting.</p><p>“Maybe you are and you’re just succumbing to that brain bleed,” he offers idly.</p><p>Evan shakes his head a little in protest. “I didn’t have a brain bleed,” he corrects, and then frowns when Connor turns to catch his eye wearing a smirk that’s just visible in the shadow.</p><p>“But you knew that already?”</p><p>The nonchalant sort of way in which Connor shrugs in reply makes it clear he did already know that not all was quite as it seemed it would be regarding the aftermath of the crash.</p><p>Evan wonders if Connor had known it would be this way all along.</p><p>Judging by the smirk, he thinks he probably had.</p><p>He sighs, resigned to the knowledge that he probably deserved it rather than angry, and then starts across his room. </p><p>“So, why are you here?” he asks as he limps to his bed, glancing up at Connor for an answer as he sits down, leaning his crutches against the wall. He has to look away as he gingerly eases his casted leg up onto the bed and then closes his eyes against the wave of pain as the injured limb inside protest angrily.</p><p>It doesn’t take long for the throbbing to abate back to the near constant ache, an ache that’s unpleasant and annoying but no longer bad enough for him to routinely take the stronger painkillers still standing in the huddle of bottles beside the wooden chest on his bedside table.</p><p>Connor’s watching him from the shadows, he realises when he opens his eyes, and under that intense gaze, it takes Evan a moment to remember what it was they were talking about. When he does, he tilts his head in question, waiting for an answer he isn’t sure he’s going to get.</p><p>Connor, or the ghost of Connor, or the figment of his imagination that takes the shape of Connor doesn’t answer questions. He just stares. Looks bored. Waits for Evan to sort his shit out for himself.</p><p>Well, terrorises him until he’s forced to, anyway.</p><p>Unexpectedly, though, Connor shifts around, swinging his boots down from where they had been pressed against the wall, and turns into the room. With his face now lit, Evan realises there’s something different about him compared to how he had been that last day in the hospital room, a little softness, maybe, where there hadn’t been before. He looks relaxed and calm too, ease and idleness replacing the boredom and frustration Evan had become so accustomed to.</p><p>“Unfinished business,” he replies lightly, and although it isn’t really an answer that answers anything, it’s at least still an answer. </p><p>Evan blinks at it, pauses his task of positioning his pillows against the headboard to lean against. “Oh?”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“What is it?”</p><p>Connor looks at Evan, shrugs in that way that makes Evan sure he already knows the answer. He kind of does, knows there are questions he wants to ask about what had happened. How could there not be?</p><p>Connor doesn’t say anything, just sits and stares knowingly until Evan’s patience cracks.</p><p>It doesn’t take long.</p><p>“I don’t understand what happened,” he admits in a rush, frowning at the figure across the room. “I-I mean. I know I was seeing what would happen if I hadn’t- hadn’t braked. But I just- like, was any of it real? Is any of this real or is it all just happening inside my head?”</p><p>Connor’s eyes flash and lip twitches. He smirks a little. “Just because it’s happening inside your head doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”</p><p>Evan’s eyebrows furrow as thinks about that, about the riddle of Connor’s words, about how it might have actually happened and also might have been imagined entirely. Neither option seems right, he can’t have died and then come back to life again, it just isn’t possible, and yet he wonders if he did simply because it all seemed so real and raw and painful. It’s as he’s thinking that he realises there’s a familiarity in the words, like he’s heard them before. Seen them somewhere. Read them, maybe.</p><p>They take a second to place.</p><p>“Are you quoting Dumbledore at me?” He glances up from the hands twisted in the tie of his dressing gown to find Connor trying not to smile. His eyes are bright and teasing. They look much more alive than Evan thinks they should.</p><p>Exasperated, Evan sighs, shoots the ghost on his windowsill a glare.</p><p>“Was it though? Real?” he asks. “Did that actually happen in, like, another universe? O-or did it happen here, and you can change time? Or were you just showing me w-what would have happened if I hadn’t braked? Like is that actually what would have happened because I died really slowly. People don’t actually die that slowly, do they?!”</p><p>Evan breaks off his outburst, finds his chest feeling almost tight with distress, his breathing a little caught.   </p><p>On the windowsill, Connor nods once, seemingly as calm as ever.   </p><p>“People don’t die that slowly,” he confirms, his tone softer than before and his expression to match. “Or, you wouldn’t have anyway.”</p><p>“So, it didn’t happen?”</p><p>Connor’s expression twists, his brows furrowing in a way that makes Evan sure he’s wrong.</p><p>“It could have happened,” he corrects, “if you’d chosen that outcome. Not that slowly, but that would have been the end result all the same.”</p><p>“So, what I saw, th-the funeral and things, that really was the future?”</p><p>Connor nods in confirmation. “Yes.”</p><p>Swallowing, Evan looks away, down at his lap, finds hands holding onto the soft fleecy fabric of his dressing gown with more force than necessary. They shake a little, and his breathing shakes, too, as the reality of what he’s nearly done comes crashing down on him again.</p><p>He’s sure it wouldn’t have just been his life ended early that day, not even just his and the drunken man driving the other car. His mom hadn’t looked well in any of the clips he saw, she hadn’t looked her age. She hadn’t looked happy either, not even close.</p><p>“How is your mom?”</p><p>Evan looks up. The ghost on the windowsill looks genuinely curious despite Evan being sure he already knows. He seems to know everything else, for sure.</p><p>“She’s okay… I think it scared her a bit, like the thought of what could have happened,” he admits. “I mean, obviously she wasn’t sat beside my bed for days waiting to see whether I would wake or, you know…, but she still got a call from the hospital saying I’d been a crash. And I was still pretty out of it when she got there.”</p><p>In truth, Evan knows he had been pretty out of it for a few days after the accident, because while it was true that he hadn’t been as badly injured in the crash as it seemed he would be, he’d still been pretty seriously hurt.</p><p>He’d still been knocked unconscious in the accident, still cut from his car and taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but this time he’d woken later that evening in the ER with his mom pale faced but dry eyed at his side. It had been confusing at first, to find himself six days prior to where he thought he would be, and even after he’d grasped what had happened, that his breaking had changed the outcome of the crash, for him at least, since the other driver had still died which was not his fault, he’d been told, he still struggled to separate the aftermaths of the two crashes each time he woke.</p><p>It hadn’t really helped that it had all been so similar, that he was still in the hospital with his mom at his side and injuries so alike ones he had heard discussed at his bedside in the ICU for so many days.</p><p>Despite the accident not being as bad the second time, he’d still ended up with a head injury, a pretty severe concussion that hadn’t helped with his confusion and that he was still feeling the lingering effects of, but there hadn’t been any bleeding in his brain, no fractured skull, no worry of permanent damage.</p><p>Unlike after the first crash, there hadn’t been any fractured vertebrae in his spine either, just wrenched muscles in his back, and while two of his ribs had still been fractured by the seatbelt, they hadn’t shifted and punctured his lung or lead to a tear in his liver. Even his broken ankle hadn’t been as bad as it had been before, the fractures still messy, but this time sure to heal fine with time and rest and physiotherapy.</p><p>He struggles not to see the significance of the broken left wrist being the only injury his other self had suffered that he hadn’t in some form.</p><p>Of the four days he had spent recovering in the hospital, he doesn’t remember a significant portion of the first two in any sort of detail, a result of the concussion and the heavy duty pain medication they had been keeping him on, but he does remember his mom being a constant presence at his side whenever he woke. Her hand had often been holding his, a gesture more comforting than the faux smile and upset always present in her eyes.</p><p>It had taken Evan a long time to get used to her pain, to not have to remind himself each time upon waking that the upset she was visibly struggling with would fade as he healed, because he would heal, this time, in this universe, that it wasn’t permanent.</p><p>That he wasn’t going to have to watch her crumble and break and fade into a shadow of her bubbly former self, her heart shattered irreparably by grief.</p><p>Not again, anyway.</p><p>“Did you tell her?”</p><p>Evan shakes his head, frowning bemusedly at the question, wondering how on earth Connor proposed he tell his mother what actually happened without ending up back in the neurology ward. Or the psych ward, one of the two.</p><p>“No, of course not,” he scoffs, and then, after a moment, he sighs and averts his gaze to his lap and the restless hands that rest there. His voice comes out smaller when he continues, quieter than before. “But I did tell her that I don’t think my meds are quite right, and that I don’t really like driving because I don’t exactly trust myself, not to… to… you know.”</p><p>Evan swallows, glances up to find Connor’s quietly attentive expression.</p><p>“She cried when I told her,” he admits heavily, “she was sad, you know, that I still felt like that but also, she- she said she was relieved that I told her instead of doing something about it, something stupid. A-and I know that’s not true, that I did do exactly that, and even though I know I can’t tell her and that it would make he more sad if I did, I really hate that I have to lie to her about it.”  </p><p>“I don’t- I’m trying not to lie about anything else, though. Like I used to tell her I was doing better whenever she asked because I thought it would make her happy for her to think I was okay, but I’m trying not to do that anymore. It isn’t productive, o-or helpful. Or good for me. I shouldn’t pretend to be okay all the time for her benefit, o-or want to get better just for her either. Jamie – my new therapist – he said that I should to want to get better for me. That just wanting to get better to keep my Mom happy isn’t going to work, n-not in the long run, anyway.</p><p>“S-so, I’m- um, I’m on different meds now, and seeing- seeing a different therapist. I don’t think Dr Sherman was- well, it wasn’t really working very well.” Evan pauses in thought, coughs a humourless laugh at the understatement. “Well, it wasn’t working at all, considering what nearly happened. What nearly happened twice, actually. But it’s… I don’t know if it’s working or not yet. I don’t feel any better a-and I’m not actually all that hopeful that I will, but I-I want to be hopeful, that one day I’ll be better, if that makes any sense?” </p><p>Connor smiles a small smile brighter than any other Evan has seen from him before, an expression that lights his tired eyes and knocks years off his age and makes him look like all his cares are solved and worries answered.</p><p>Well, maybe they are, Evan realises, for the moment anyway.</p><p>“I should- um, I should probably say thank you.”</p><p>Connor frowns at that, his eyebrows furrowing and his head tilting to the side in genuine question. “What for?”</p><p>“You saved my life. Saved my mom’s too, I think.”</p><p>Connor shakes his head dismissively. “No, I didn’t,” he objects lightly, “it was your decision. You chose this outcome, even if it wasn’t necessarily for the right reasons. I just showed you the effects of the alternative.”</p><p>For a second, Evan considers that, considers Connor’s point of him being the one to make the decision, which was true, and him having made that decision for the wrong reason, which, Evan reluctantly realised was also true, even though it wasn’t really him that decided upon that route of reasoning. That blame, he had to lay on Connor. It was him who had shown him what he’d seen, after all.</p><p>The idea of his mom’s unhealing heartbreak, and that of his friends, had been enough to force him back to the car at the time, and although now he knows that hadn’t been the healthiest of reasons to change his mind on whether he wanted to keep living or not, he knows deep in his heart that had Connor tried to make him change his mind for the right ones, he probably wouldn’t have done so.</p><p>“I guess,” he agrees, slowly, looking up to find Connor’s gaze, “You still gave me the chance to decide though, still showed me why it was a bad idea.” He pauses briefly in thought, eyes still fixed on the young ghost lounging on his windowsill, then sighs. “Hey, I’m… I’m sorry no one was there to do the same for you.”</p><p>Connor’s eyes widen and his expression twitches, his ease turning to confusion to defense to something that might just be relief then back to neutral so quickly Evan would have missed it all had he blinked. “Thanks,” he says quietly, seriously, a hint of surprise and something lighter cracking through his hard façade.</p><p>Evan nods in reply, shoots him a small, sad smile, wonders if he ought to say something in reply despite nothing more feeling like it needs to be said.</p><p>A heartbeat of silence ticks by, and then Evan’s worry is irrelevant as Connor is speaking again.</p><p>“You should go back to sleep, it’s late, and I hear rest is good for healing bones.”</p><p>Evan frowns at both Connor’s blatant dismissal and the clock on his wall, squinting to see the hands through the dim lighting. He sighs at the time, and at the fact that Connor is definitely right.</p><p>“Yeah, probably,” he agrees slowly, reluctantly, despite having quite suddenly realised his eyelids are heavy and a headache has been building in his temples for quite some time. He doesn’t really want to sleep, doesn’t want to leave Connor or end the conversation, but somehow, it feels right to do so. It’s like everything that needs to be said has been said.</p><p>A second passes, and then with his breath held, Evan eases himself back under the covers and out of his dressing gown, and then sits there, eyes closed as he waits for the throbbing to abate. After a moment, gives in and takes the condensated water bottle from the damp pocket and uses it to wash down a couple of his painkillers from the bottle on his cabinet. Connor watches as he does so, and as he places the half full water bottle back on the water-ringed wood of his bedside table and then rearranges his pillows so they’re not still propped against his headboard.</p><p>“Well, um, night, I guess?” he says despite not expecting a goodnight wish in return, and then, with one last glance at the ghost still sat on his windowsill, he shuts off his light.</p><p>Evan doesn’t think he’d fall asleep easily with Connor in his room, but somehow, he does.</p><p> </p><p>When Evan wakes that morning, his room is bright with the sunlight filtering through his curtains, and from downstairs, he can hear his mom singing along to the radio and the clattering of plates as she cleans up from their meal the night before. He lays there for a moment, listening contently to the singing echoing up from the kitchen and the traffic outside his window and the birds playing in the garden, and then remembers who he had been listening to only a few hours before.</p><p>There isn’t a figure lounging in front of his curtains when he looks over, just blue fabric glowing brightly with the morning sun, but he isn’t all that surprised. He hadn’t expected to see Connor there. He does stare in that direction though, his brow ruffled in confusion, because on the bedside table, his water bottle sits mostly empty, just a few dregs of warm water caught around the corners of the base.</p><p>For a moment, Evan blinks at it trying to remember if he’d woken again later and drunk the remains of what was left or just dreamt the whole vividly remembered period of wakefulness and not filled it up at all, and then he sighs and looks back to the curtains and their unhindered blue glow. There’s no one there, not now, maybe not ever.</p><p>He doesn’t know. </p><p>He doesn’t understand.</p><p>He isn’t sure he’s meant to.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
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